Forget doing the ‘math’ and stick to proper English

Last week, I was sent an email from a “work-life balance expert” offering tips on staying cheerful in times of financial strife.

What struck me most about this message – apart from its trite fatuousness – was the assumption that we need cheering up when the economy is down.

I have never seen any evidence that happiness moves in tandem with economic activity. I’m no less happy now than I was in the boom of the mid-2000s. And if I am upset, it’s not because of the economy but because the ceiling has just fallen down in my hall and so there is grit in my bed and in the fridge.

In fact, it’s possible that happiness may even rise in recessions. There was a study a couple of years ago that showed that people in work are marginally more content during hard times because they are grateful to have a job.

However, according to last week’s press release, the path to good cheer in recession lies through “living exponentially”. Just looking at this phrase causes my happiness levels to suffer a dip. The word “exponential” has taken a lot of abuse from managers who use it to describe any growth that is more than sluggish. Whereas in maths an exponential graph goes swiftly from almost flat to almost vertical, this pattern is seldom traced by any market I’ve ever come across.

But now the term seems to have slipped free of its mathematical moorings altogether: living “exponentially” involves having “quality time with yourself” and “living in your own truth”.

Speaking from the vantage point of my own truth, I find some things are truer than others. Truest of all are mathematical truths, and it is therefore upsetting to see them being pilfered shamelessly by innumerate managers eager to lend an aura of fact to what is usually a glob of guff.

Exponential is the least of it. Now every happening in business is called a “data point”, and change is increasingly known as “delta”, as in “what’s the delta on that?”

“Inflection point” is similarly debased. In maths, this is when the curvature goes from positive to negative but to managers it is a grandiose way of saying maximum or minimum. Last month, I saw it had been degraded further in a gung-ho article on the Huffington Post by a social entrepreneur entitled “The Inflection Point, The ‘Aha’ Moment” – in which it meant nothing at all.

Managers have a long history in playing fast and loose with percentages to make themselves look good. When it comes to effort, an impossible 110 per cent used to be regarded as a bare minimum.

All sorts of other things are just plain wrong when they are translated from maths to business talk. “To decimate” means to reduce by one-tenth; it does not mean to slash. “Infinite” means immeasurably large; it isn’t a general term to mean a lot. And “quantum” is something very, very small, not something very, very big.

More distressing than any of the above, however, is the phrase “Do the math”. This would be fine if it were a genuine invitation to whip out one’s slide rule. Instead it is a slightly threatening way of asserting: I’m right and I have logic on my side.

Last month, Barack Obama claimed that his tax package “isn’t class warfare. It’s math.” But it wasn’t math, really. It was politics. Yet at least President Obama is American, and so the phrase sounds better on his lips. On BBC Radio Four last week, I heard a Brit taking about the far right in UK politics, urging listeners to “do the maths” – which sounded even worse.

The strangest thing about all this misuse of mathematics is that when there is an actual need to discuss figures, managers go all coy, and proper numerical terms are nowhere to be seen.

Indeed, in business, numbers are not called numbers any more – they are called “metrics”. Which is a bit bizarre, when you think that metrics are about the study of metre in poetry. And in the mouths of modern managers, numbers no longer do anything as basic as go up and down: they go north and south as if they were points on a map.

Last week in a meeting I heard a finance manager say the following words: “We’re looking to see our metrics coming in north of the 3 mill mark.”

If he had done the maths before opening his mouth, he might have put it rather better and said: the number will be bigger than three million or X>3m.

September 05, 2011

Cheers to those with a half-empty glass

By Lucy Kellaway

In business, optimism is good and pessimism bad. Optimists have a monopoly on success, on happiness and even on longevity. Pessimists, with their long faces and dark thoughts are pariahs, thought fit for nothing in the gung-ho corporate world except possibly careers in journalism (where bad news is good news). Otherwise, they have a choice between the couch, the closet or the comedy circuit.

But now pessimism may be coming back to the mainstream. The turn came last Monday, when management guru Tom Peters tweeted enthusiastically about a book that extols negative thinking. This is an extraordinary turnround for a man whose logo is a colourful exclamation mark and who for decades has been relentlessly, exhaustingly upbeat. The fact that the inventor of “Wow!” and “Brand Me” is now dabbling with negativity is the most exciting thing I’ve heard in a long time.

Unlike Mr Peters, I was born pessimistic. I expect a sudden downpour to spoil every summer party; I am confident that every initiative will end in failure; at least half the dresses in my wardrobe are grey. Were it not for the fact that I never celebrate anything in advance just in case it doesn’t happen, I would be dancing a jig at the idea that people like me are going to be rehabilitated.

I’ve dashed to look up the book Mr Peters recommends, which turns out to be written by Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College. She spent 18 years doing careful research only to reach the sensible – if taboo – conclusion that it’s a good idea to think about all the things that might go wrong before embarking on something. Unfortunately she has limited her scope to people who are anxious, but it seems to me she has stumbled on a truth that applies universally.

Even more unfortunately, the publishers have sugarcoated the slightly subversive message with a brainlessly upbeat title: The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Use Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety & Perform at Your Peak. Still, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, and perhaps Prof Norem has now softened up the market for negativity sufficiently to prepare it for the book I’d like to write myself (if Mr Peters doesn’t get there first). I might call it: Pear-shaped: Why Things Always Go Wrong at Work, and How to Cope When They Do.

The trouble with optimists is that they don’t do well in a pear-shaped world. In prisoner of war camps in Vietnam, the people who died first were the positive thinkers: they fully expected to be back home by Christmas and fell to pieces when they weren’t. Admittedly, the world of business isn’t exactly like a prisoner of war camp, in that you can nip out for a latte and you can sleep in your own comfy bed at night. But it can be grim and relentless and one bad thing can happen after another and being always prepared for the worst seems to me the only wise course of action. Woody Allen put it best: “Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

Even though a rehabilitation of pessimists is to be welcomed, there is little point pushing the point in self-help books. Optimists and pessimists were born that way; there is no change that can come from picking up a tip or two in a book, the only change comes through time – which tends to soften all extremes. I fancy I’m marginally less pessimistic than I was 30 years ago, having discovered that, once in a while, things can actually pass off rather well. Optimists eventually discover the reverse – and perhaps a drastic version of this is all that is happening with Tom Peters (who has also taken to tweeting cheesy quotes from Mother Teresa, which is never a good sign).

In any case, it is stupid to argue about which view of the world is best, when both views are clearly needed all of the time. Every organisation and every partnership should be carefully balanced to include both optimists and pessimists. A marriage also needs both – my own experience has taught me that it’s good to have an optimist to come up with endless wild schemes for picnics and outings and a pessimist to swash the maddest ones and temper the rest with paracetamol and umbrellas.

Businesses need both even more to have just the right mix of daring and caution. Diversity of optimists and pessimists is the most important sort there is and should be actively sought at board level and every level below. Corporate pessimists should be de-stigmatised and beckoned out of the closet. Above all, they should stop having to pretend to see the glass half full just to suit the fashion. They should be proud to declare that for them, it has been half empty all along.

August 13, 2011

Six little words and one very big question

By Lucy Kellaway

Every week when writing this column I set myself a theme and try to do it justice in about 800 words. This week I am going to do things a bit differently. My theme is something I’ve touched on before – why we do the jobs we do – but my word count has shrunk. I have only six words in which to nail it.

I am limiting myself like this in response to a competition sponsored by Mercer, the management consultancy, and Smith magazine, which invites people to submit six-word stories with the title “Why I Do What I Do”. I like the idea. It’s good sometimes to wonder what keeps you in your job; the tight word limit makes waffle and pretentiousness out of bounds.

So I sat down and spent a while chewing my pen. Why do I do what I do? After a small crisis that such profound thinking inevitably brings on and after much searching of soul and wallet, I have come up with the following entry: “Money, recognition, gossip, freedom, satisfaction, mirth.”

My six words are by no means perfect, but I’m not displeased with them as they are honest and pretty much cover the waterfront. Perhaps “mirth” is a bit of a stretch, but I couldn’t face writing “fun” as it sounded too trite. Yet for some inexplicable reason I seem not to have won. Instead, prizes have been given to: “Amateur chocolatier, making life little sweeter” and “Because brilliant ideas die without encouragement.”

The only thing these entries have over mine is a better narrative flow. The first is a cheesy slogan with a word missing, and the second a shocker. I take it all back about the impossibility of being pretentious in six words. And I am particularly disappointed to discover that the woman who wrote “Because brilliant ideas deserve encouragement” is a careers adviser at Oxford university. They weren’t like that in my day. Back then they did what they did for another six-word reason: introducing spoilt graduates to real world.

I’ve had a skim through some of the other entries and find the judges have missed some gems. I like “After 38 years, still not sure”, but my runaway favourite is “tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick”. This is simple, elegant, works on many levels and I wish I’d been sufficiently Zen to come up with it myself. It is a clock ticking, marking out a working day. It stands for the repetition that is a big part of all jobs; it also suggests that six boxes are being ticked, but leaves it up to the reader to decide what they are.

Otherwise the entries are astoundingly grim. “Desire: being part of the solution.” “Chances to reach others. Deeply. Spiritually.” “Work is Passion. Passion is work.” Are they joking? What brave new world is this? After spending half an hour trawling through this sort of bilge, a four-word story has formed in my head: Pass the sick bag.

Hoping for something better, I have set up a competition of my own, inviting colleagues to write their own short stories on the same subject. They have approached the task with zeal – though mostly reaching for the reassuring journalistic default position of cynicism. “Fear and greed, like everyone else,” said one colleague. “Haven’t been offered a better job,” said another, while a third said: “Got no Sky Sports at home.”

Another popular theme was work as escape. One mother of three writes from the heart: “To get away from the kids.” Another puts it more elaborately: “Daily vicissitudes conveniently occlude enduring questions.” I had to look up what occlude means, but wholeheartedly endorse the sentiment. I also agree with the still darker version: “Deadens the drumming of the demon.”

After much deliberation, I’ve chosen three winners which I think are variously true, surprising and profound. The first is “Tried banking. Didn’t like it.” I love this story. It has great plot structure. It is also dead right in that lots of us (me included) end up doing something because something else didn’t work out.

The second prize hints at something deeper. “To find better version of myself.” This is daringly at odds with the current mood. Post phone hacking, journalism is generally believed to be where you go to find a worse version of yourself.

But the one that I like most of all is “Because it is hard and easy.” These six little words are oddly deep. A job that is only hard is too exhausting, a job that is only easy is too dull. The right balance is what makes a good job so very special.

In case you haven’t had your fill of six-word stories, I want to add another of my own, inspired by my work this week. Why I do what I do? “Colleagues make me think and laugh.”

June 07, 2011

E-mail contract is not worth the kilobytes

By Lucy Kellway

Published: June 5 2011 20:47 | Last updated: June 5 2011 20:47

This column may be illegal. In writing it, I am inviting Philips, the Dutch electronics company, to sue me – and I’m rather hoping it will. Then I would be the first person in history taken to court for disobeying the most annoying and most pointless legal paragraph ever drafted.

The contract I’m about to break is the one that sits at the bottom of almost every business e-mail. In simple terms, it says that if the e-mail isn’t addressed to you, you must delete it at once, notify the sender and not tell a soul. I’m not the first to ignore such a command, indeed it is flouted hundreds of thousands of times every hour – almost every time that anyone forwards anything at work.

The other day I received a message that was most definitely not intended for me, but was passed on by a reader who thought I might like it. It was written by Frans van Houten, the new chief executive of Philips and sent to all his 100,000 employees to tell them about a management initiative.

“We agreed a new set of values ... as they are better suited to unlock our full potential in a fast moving world,” he said. He explained that these new values “would replace the 4 D’s” – which turn out to be such dismal, dull, derivative and depressing things as “Delight customers” and “Develop people”.

He quoted Gandhi (who surely would never have uttered the words “Be the Change”, had he known just how many scores of dodgy management initiatives would be launched on the strength of them). He finished by inviting underlings to go with him on a “journey” named Accelerate! “We have asked the 200 leaders ... to own and drive Accelerate! ... Please join me and Accelerate! to win together.”

Immediately below this stirring sign-off came the normal disclaimer. It said the message was confidential, and “intended solely for the addressee(s). If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, forwarding, dissemination, or reproduction of this message is strictly prohibited ... please contact the sender by return e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message.”

Rather than do as instructed, I have decided to follow the common law of the internet. This decrees that whenever you get a crass message, you must forward it to everyone in your address book, or post it on your blog, or, if you are fortunate to have such a thing, write about it in your newspaper column.

In so doing, I am at least notifying the sender, though maybe not in the way his disclaimer intended. My justification for passing the e-mail on is that the world needs to know when public companies are indulging in flabby management nonsense. I think it’s fair to bet that Accelerate! – despite the additional oomph that comes from the exclamation point – is not going to “unlock full potential” in any world, fast-moving or not.

Of course, Philips could now see me in court. If it does, I don’t think it’s going to win. I’ve consulted some experts who assure me that in European law it’s pretty much impossible to foist this sort of contract on someone unilaterally. Legal disclaimers on e-mails are not only unenforced but unenforceable – making one wonder why they are so popular. The only plausible explanation is that companies use them simply because others do; no one dares be odd one out.

Last week I got a short e-mail from someone who works at the French bank BNP Paribas with a long disclaimer that made the Philips one look restrained.

It started off by doing some legal defining of terms, explaining that message will hitherto be denoted by “message”. Having done this in English, it went on to do it in French as well.

Finally, after a whole series of heavy warnings given in both languages, it bossily instructs the recipients: “Please consider the environment before printing.”

This is a damned cheek. Anyone who elects to print out this e-mail (a decision is surely up to the recipient, not to the sender) is thus forced to waste a lot of additional ink and paper as these paragraphs are automatically and needlessly reproduced in hard copy.

I’m happy to report that e-mails sent from the FT system are neither bossy nor threatening, and come in just one language. Every e-mail finishes thus: “This e-mail was sent by a company owned by Pearson plc ... Registered in England and Wales with company number 53723”.

This is good for being brief, though less good for containing a numerical fact that I bet no one who has ever received an e-mail from me has ever found even slightly diverting. There is a way of making this automatic sign-off better and briefer still: do without it altogether.

May 15, 2011

The dull names of those who rose

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 1 2011 19:17 | Last updated: May 1 2011 19:17

Whenever I used to hear that someone had saddled a son with a name like Tarquin, Apollo or Silas, I always feared that the child would be teased at school. I now find I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. The real damage done by an outlandish name doesn’t happen in the playground but in the boardroom.

LinkedIn has just consulted its database of 100m professionals and found that chief executives overwhelmingly have boring first names. When it comes to the corner office, Ed will do nicely but Tarquin will not do at all: the most popular CEO names are Peter, Bob, Jack, Bruce and Fred.

I wonder that I have never noticed this before. If I trawl my mind for the names of the most remarkable corporate titans, they all have unremarkable, monosyllabic first names – Bill (Gates), Paul (Allen), Jack (Welch), John (Chambers). If they were born with longer names, they make them shorter: Jeffrey becomes Jeff (Immelt); Robert becomes Bob (Nardelli, Horton); and Christopher becomes Chris (Gent).

Two syllables are only really acceptable when they are a cute version of a more formal name. There is Jamie (Dimon), Sandy (Weill), Larry (Bossidy). But three syllables are not acceptable at all. I can’t think of a single famous boss in the US or UK with a long first name. Even less can I think of one with a flamboyant or weird one. The only mad name that sticks in my mind is Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, the disgraced former head of Elf. But he doesn’t really count as he is a) French and b) has spent rather a long time in prison.

The LinkedIn research suggests different sorts of corporate jobs attract people with different names. If you have a cheery-chappy name such as Budd or Troy or Chip, then you will do well in sales, while a longer, straighter name such as Andrew will make you a perfect engineer. If, however, your name has seven or more letters, corporate life isn’t right for you at all. You should open a restaurant instead.

This idea – that your name shapes your career – passes under the name of “nominative determinism”. One of its supporters is the journalist David Brooks, who has dredged up the peculiar fact that people called Dennis are more likely than most to end up as dentists, while people called Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers. We want, he says, to do things that sound like us. I’ve often marvelled at how this idea works negatively: financial villains tend to have dodgy names – think of Madoff or Fuld, for example.

When I was at school, I thought such things a tremendous joke. “Have you read Great Falls by Eileen Dover?” I’d ask, and then scream with laughter. But real life turns out to be funnier than childish jokes: there was an article written on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (vol 49, pp173-176, 1977) by J.W. Splatt and D. Weedon.

Though the statistical evidence for nominative determinism may be a bit flaky, it figures. If we accept that the way people look affects their careers, then it isn’t unreasonable to think their names do too.

However, in the case of CEOs, what the Bob-Bill-Jack ascendancy tells us about corporate life is rather depressing. It says that diversity is bunkum: B-B-J puts foreigners at a clear disadvantage. Indeed, if you are born Gróf András István, but fancy running a big semiconductor company in the US, then you would be well advised to change your name to Andy Grove instead.

Indeed, the standard management guff tells us that the people who get ahead are the ones that are “unique” and “authentic”. Yet B-B-J shows this to be nonsense – if you want to get on, you need to sound and seem as unremarkable as everyone else.

B-B-J is evidence of a pervasive corporate lie. We are led to think that CEOs are friendly, when in fact it is their job to make people do things they don’t want to do and then fire them if they are not up to scratch. The matey little names – that seem to say “let’s have a couple of beers” – hoodwink us into thinking otherwise.

Finally, B-B-J tells us that it’s different for girls. The women CEOs on LinkedIn aren’t called Sue and Jill and Beth. They are Cynthia, Deborah and Carolyn; like my own CEO, Marjorie Scardino, they choose to use all three glorious syllables. Their names aren’t saying “let’s have a beer” but something more honest, if a bit more desperate: “Take me seriously.”

People often say that there will only be equality at the top when there are as many incompetent women CEOs as there are incompetent men. I’ve got another measure. Equality will be with us only when our female leaders ask to be called Debs and Marge.

May 10, 2011

Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on?

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 8 2011 17:00 | Last updated: May 8 2011 17:00

Returning to the office last Tuesday after a long weekend, I couldn’t start work as I’d forgotten my computer password. Perhaps it was the combined excitement of a spectacular wedding followed by a spectacular death, but my brain was no longer able to retrieve a simple sequence of seven characters.

In the early days of computers I never forgot my password. But that’s because the top secret word I’d chosen was “Kellaway”, which I found could be effortlessly recalled even in the most fraught moments. Things only started to go awry when the computer security experts told me this password would no longer do. Reluctantly, I went for something a bit more elaborate and, to make sure I didn’t forget it, I wrote the word on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen.

But now Post-it notes are frowned on and the computer insists that my new password must contain a confusing mixture of cases, numbers and squiggles and be endlessly changed. To help me cope, I have devised a system: I rotate people in my family, with capital letters, punctuation and ages. Yet, as I found on Tuesday, this system is not foolproof. I daresay it is simple enough for any hacker to crack in a nanosecond, but it is complicated enough to foil me. I can’t remember which family member’s turn it is, whether it’s a full-stop or a comma, or how old they are.

It would be bad enough if there was just one password to remember. But I have passwords for my bank, e-mail, Amazon and for everything else I’ve ever bought online. Most of these are variations on a theme, some longer than others, but which is which?

I take some comfort from the fact that my remedial performance is better than that of some. A recent study of 23m passwords showed that by far the most popular password is still 123456. Of words, “Password” is in first place, followed by “Iloveyou” and then – bafflingly – by “princess” and “rockyou”.

There is a new App that will shortly be available on iPhones offering a series of pictures to help us remember random passwords, but it looks a bit complicated to me. Instead, I can think of a simpler mnemonic based on the only thing I can ever remember perfectly – Beatles’ lyrics. Thus a splendid password could be H!Ins, H!Nja – (“Help! I need somebody, Help! Not just anybody”). But there are two problems with this. First, I’m not sure I have the punctuation right, and, according to a recent academic study, mnemonic passwords may be no more difficult to hack than your kid’s names.

Many sites try to make things more secure by asking supposedly memorable questions. But I find the answers to these tend not to be memorable at all. Indeed, I often have to invent answers and then write them in my diary so that I don’t forget them. Which zip code were you born in? Er, no idea. What was your father’s middle name? He didn’t have one.

Even worse are the websites that think preferences are more secure than facts. Whenever I want to check how much money I have in my account, my bank asks me: What is your favourite food? As I don’t really have a favourite food, I found myself writing: Maltesers, but this didn’t feel quite right. Worse still is being asked to name your best friend. Like most adults I’ve advanced beyond the stage of having one. So do I write down my best friend from primary school? And should I still write her down even though we’ve had a bit of a falling out?

In the end, however obscure your password, we now know that it isn’t safe. Whoever hacked into the PlayStation network last month now has access to 100m passwords, and even though these are apparently “hashed” – ie scrambled – with a bit of further hacking they can presumably be unhashed. And given that most of the users probably use the same passwords for everything, the hackers could well have a high old time dipping into bank accounts and spending other people’s money online.

The few real techies I know have tried to protect themselves by buying software that generates an endless stream of random passwords and remembers the lot of them. There is a problem with this, too. You have to remember a master password to get into the system.

In the end, I can’t help wondering why it’s all so complicated. In order to do the most sensitive thing of all – get my hands on my own cash – all I need is a plastic card and a simple PIN code of four numbers. I don’t need to know my favourite food or remember how old my children are. Why is it that we still can’t do the same thing on a computer?

April 11, 2011

You might be a total genius, but I wouldn’t tell you so

Last week, when a woman in our travel department booked me a flight, I sent her an e-mail: “That’s absolutely marvellous – thanks so much.”

In congratulating her so warmly for doing her job, I thought I was being charming and gracious, but now I see I was actually doing something rather darker. Not only was I debasing the language, but was pushing a drug that turns people into demotivated, infantile, praise-dependent junkies.

This rethink was brought on by a discussion with a columnist friend who has just gone to work for a rival newspaper.

He told me that his first column was declared by his new editor to be “utterly brilliant”. The second was deemed “a simply extraordinary piece of writing”. And when he filed the third, he got an e-mail back before the editor had even had time to read it saying: “Got it – you’re a total genius.”

When I said that this sounded rather nice, he gave me a scornful look. It made him think his editor stupid, which made him feel stupid by extension. To be considered a total genius for merely delivering his column on time was degrading all round.

My friend may not, in fact, be a total genius but is definitely a total weirdo – at least by comparison to me. I am exceedingly fond of being called a genius; even though I prefer to have genius status granted for big things, I’m prepared to accept it for any achievement at all, even for pressing send on my computer.

In fact there is no amount of praise that sets my teeth on edge. Mine is a debased condition, but is at least perfectly normal. There was a study done recently by a woman at the University of California, Berkeley, who found that you can go on and on laying on the flattery and it goes on working. There is no level when people say: stop, now you’ve gone too far.

This means we all go too far all the time. In the US, people have been over-egging praise for generations. But now in Britain, proud traditions of cynicism and understatement have been cast aside. The most banal observation counts as an “insight”, while anything that vaguely makes sense is said to have “compelling logic”. In the UK, all workers are called “talent” no matter how profoundly untalented they actually are, and even this is not enough. At KPMG, every member of staff is a genius. “We have 138,000 outstanding professionals,” it says on its website, an exaggeration so gross that I would think twice before allowing KPMG anywhere near my audit.

The result of such inflationary pressure is that language has ceased to be a store of meaning. One evening last week I was judging some awards for business TV programmes and one of my fellow judges described his favourite entry as “moderately interesting”. At the time I was faintly disgusted by his lack of enthusiasm, but now I see he was quite right: most business TV is pretty feeble and so to be moderately interesting is pretty high praise.

The same day, I’d observed an editor in my own office tying himself in knots trying to describe an article that he genuinely admired. “What can I say?” he asked, paused, and then went on: “To edit copy like this . . . is . . . a privilege.”

Congratulation inflation not only damages language, it is bad for us psychologically. Praise is a Class A drug and we crave more and get upset when we don’t get any in sufficiently pure form.

When I was told recently by someone that they had “liked” my column I felt downcast. Liked? I thought, reaching what seemed to me the inevitable conclusion that they therefore hated it.

The most worrying thing about over-egged praise is that it makes us less good at our jobs. Not because it makes us complacent, but because it makes us neurotic.

There was a fascinating experiment done a decade ago at Columbia University, comparing 10-year-olds who were praised for being clever to those who were praised for diligence. The first group got distressed and demotivated when faced with any task that they couldn’t do easily. The second met failure with composure: they simply worked harder to succeed next time.

As most workers are similar to 10-year-olds, praise at work should be doled out in the same way – never for inspiration, always for perspiration. Fortunately, according to this distinction, I deserve some praise for filing this column. The wireless router at home is on the blink, and so getting online has required many hours of extreme aggravation on the phone to Virgin, and then calling a neighbour to use their wireless network. Thus, by dint of successfully having pressed send, I am a total genius, after all.

March 28, 2011

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: March 27 2011 15:52 | Last updated: March 27 2011 15:52

On the lavatory wall of a colleague’s flat in Hong Kong hangs a framed letter. It is written on HSBC notepaper, and dated January 22, 1998. “Dear Sir,” it begins. “Please note that we have had occasion to return your cheque due to insufficient funds in the above account. This state of affairs is most unsatisfactory and the practice of issuing cheques without first ensuring that there are sufficient funds to meet them must cease forthwith, otherwise it will be necessary for your account in our books to be closed.

In displaying this letter in such a prominent place, my colleague was seeking to amuse his visitors with its Indian-English verbosity. In reprinting it here, I have a grander purpose. For all its stiff wording, it is the best letter to a customer I’ve ever seen. It sums up everything that used to be good about banking, but which has got hopelessly lost. Indeed, if all bankers still behaved like P. Mandal, there would have been no financial crisis.

For him, banking was a solemn matter, where prudence was all- important. In his world, there was none of the dodgy stuff that all banks now routinely engage in: pretending the customer is king while fleecing them if they go into the red, and investing their money in incomprehensible and ruinous financial instruments. Instead, recalcitrant customers were given a thorough telling off – which made them behave better. My colleague tells me that he has, indeed, ceased his unsatisfactory behaviour forthwith: he has not bounced a cheque since January 1998.

It all makes one wish P. Mandal had been transported from Bangalore to the London HQ and made chief executive instead of Sir John Bond. The Indian banker would never in a million years have agreed to the £9bn takeover of Household, the US subprime lender it bought in 2002. He would have cast one eye over the loan book with its millions of dodgy customers who could not afford their mortgages and said he wanted nothing to do with them.

But it is not just his prudence I like. It’s his writing style, too. Though somewhat pompous, it is short and to the point. And despite its threatening message, it is immaculately polite. “This state of affairs is most unsatisfactory” is a delightful and useful phrase that deserves to be rehabilitated at once.

The same day I was inspecting the walls of my colleague’s lavatory so approvingly, I was e-mailed an exchange that had just taken place between an FT reader and Comcast. She had sent a brief message to the cable operator complaining that she couldn’t find out how to get her mobile phone bill itemised. The reply was everything the lavatory letter was not: disingenuous, unintelligent, emotionally incontinent, unhelpful and miles too long.

“We are very glad to have you as part of Comcast family,” it began, unpromisingly. The idea that in signing up for an account with a mobile phone operator, one is not merely agreeing to share its airwaves but to share its genetic lineage is most disturbing.

The e-mail continued “ . . . and it is our privilege to provide you an exceptional and unparalleled customer service”. This is even worse – a combination of excessive bowing and scraping with excessive boasting, without conveying any meaning at all.

“Thank you for bringing this billing concern to our attention, Elizabeth”, it goes on. “Elizabeth”? How dare they? P. Mandal would have had a stroke at such fresh familiarity.

“Rest assured that we will properly address the concern by making sure that the best resolution will be provided to suffice your overall satisfaction . . . ”

I’m getting restive even typing this drivel out and so you will have to believe me that there are 500 more words of the same, including further apologies, further congratulations and wishes that Elizabeth have a nice day – without actually solving the problem in hand.

“We appreciate that you took time out from your busy schedule to share your concerns,” it said. But if they thought her schedule was busy, why did they think she would have time to read so much guff?

Finally, the sign off: a first name and a title, Comcast customer care specialist. At last, something with meaning. The author of this reply has proved herself a specialist in “customer care” – a virtuoso at apology and making all the most fashionable noises. The only problem is that there is no need for specialists in this area. Customers don’t want “care”. They just want their bills itemised.

Pen and paper: the forgotten management tool

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: March 6 2011 22:12 | Last updated: March 6 2011 22:12

Last week I went out for a pizza with a man I hadn’t seen for a while. The bill was low; I picked it up. Two days later, a small, cream envelope arrived on my doormat. Inside was a folded piece of paper on which he had written a short note saying how much he had enjoyed the occasion.

This letter, which arrived in the same post as four items of junk mail and a credit card statement, pleased me beyond reason. I was almost moved to snatch up my pen and write a thank-you letter in return to thank him for his.

Handwritten thank-yous are so thoroughly effective as a way of making other people feel good, it is mad that no one writes them anymore. In the last year I think I’ve only written one – and that was to thank my mother-in-law for the ham she always sends at Christmas. Had she owned a computer, I don’t think I would have written any at all.

In the office, the handwritten thank-you is even more powerful – and even more underused. Every time an employee makes a special effort they are doing the equivalent of buying a pizza or giving a ham to their employer. But they don’t expect thanks for it – which is just as well, as they don’t generally get any.

They do sometimes get a blanket thank-you to everyone (“thanks to all our people for their unstinting dedication during 2010” etc, etc) but such broad and bland declarations of gratitude have no effect on morale at all. Very occasionally, bosses take it into their heads to spit out an individual thank-you face to face (which is nice but wears off quickly) or send one by e-mail (which is nicer as it lasts longer but is somewhat flat).

One man who knows the power of the thank-you note is Doug Conant, who has been running Campbell’s Soup for a decade. In a recent blog for Harvard Business Review he says that every day he spends time with an assistant combing the company for people deserving thanks and then writes them a letter. Over the past 10 years he has fired off 30,000 of them – more than 10 each day.

My first thought on reading this is that the man is a genius.

My second thought was that he is an idiot to have revealed his secret, and thus devalue his currency. Who wants to treasure a note of thanks when they know there are 29,999 others in circulation?

Yet as I read the many gushing comments posted online by his employees, I saw I was quite wrong. The handwritten thank-you seems to be a currency that holds its value. Each letter, by definition, is written individually, so it doesn’t matter how many others there are. And once received, it can be kept in a drawer for reading until it falls to pieces.

The thank-you letter is not only incredibly effective, it costs nothing and has no nasty side effects. It doesn’t demotivate others – unless the recipients have the poor taste to frame their letters and stick them up above their desks. All in all, the ratio of effort in writing letters (very low) to pleasure on receiving them (extraordinarily high) must make this the most remarkable motivational technique there is.

Readers of the blog seem to agree: “Doug, What an inspiring post! The positive energy in written notes is healing in the workplace. Positive, genuine feedback is uplifting to our human wholeness. Thanks for sharing!” writes one.

But if these notes are so uplifting to our human wholeness, why is Mr Conant so unusual in writing any?

There seem to be three reasons. First, chief executives think their own contribution is more valuable than that of others, and as no one ever writes them thank-you letters they don’t write any themselves. Second, they aren’t close enough to the business to know who deserves thanks, and third, they have forgotten the strange human truth that almost everyone would do almost anything in return for a simple pat on the back.

On the rare occasion when they want to say thanks, they probably don’t pick up a pen because they have forgotten how to hold one or think it is going to take too long.

I’ve just put this to the test. Admittedly the start was slow as I had to rummage round in the stationery cupboard to get the right kit. But after that there was no stopping me. I took the lid off the pen and wrote: “Lucy, what an inspired column! Great positive energy! Thanks for sharing.” I put it in an envelope and wrote my name on the front. My handwriting is jagged from disuse, but still readable. Total time taken: 55 seconds.

January 16, 2011

Finnish lesson on principles for Goldman

Lloyd Blankfein is in need of advice on the principles of business. Fortunately, I have just the man to give it to him: Hannu Penttilä, a Finnish shopkeeper who runs a chain of department stores.

His company, Stockmann, and the mighty Goldman Sachs are rather similar. Both have both been around for 150 years. Both are good at what they do. Yet when it comes to explaining how they conduct themselves, the US bank makes the most horrible hash of it, while the Finnish retailer gets it just right.

Last week Goldman produced a 63-page document on how it proposes to clean up its act, which began with The Goldman Sachs Business Principles. These are 14 in number, which is far too many for anyone to remember, even for Goldman people who, as the bank says, are the very best. Each principle is rather long, and after having read and reread them I am left feeling exasperated, confused and as if I’ve been lightly clubbed around the head.

Still, at least the first principle is pithy and memorable. “Our clients always come first,” it says. There is only one problem with this: it isn’t true. Not only is it not true in specific cases (like when Goldman sold “shitty deals” to clients and bragged about them), it isn’t true generally. Any bank really interested in its clients would shut down most of its M&A department on the grounds that buying other companies almost always works out badly.

The second principle is a long screed about Goldman’s “unswerving adherence” to being legal and ethical, with the result that the bank’s speciality – generating profit – gets shunted into third place. “Our goal is to provide superior returns to our shareholders,” the principle starts, making it sound almost altruistic. There is no mention of anything as vulgar as money; the word “superior” is pleasingly ungreedy. “Profitability is critical to achieving superior returns,” it explains, passing off a tautology as if it were an insight.

Now let’s see how the retailer does it. The first of its six short principles goes like this: “We are in business to make money; all our operations should support this goal.”

After this, its customers get a look in: “We earn money only by offering benefits which the customer perceives as real and better than those of our competitors.”

This is the right way round, and I particularly like the honesty of the word “perceives”. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Stockmann has four more principles: efficiency, commitment, respect for its staff and social responsibility. On the last it simply says: “Our way of operating is ethical and just.”

By contrast, Goldman makes of a meal of being ethical. Having already declared its devotion to ethics in Principle 2, Principle 14 says: “Integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business. We expect our people to maintain high ethical standards in everything they do, both in their work for the firm and in their personal lives.”

Saying it twice doesn’t strengthen the message, it weakens it. And the bit about ethics in personal lives is alarmingly vague. Does it mean any banker who cheats on his wife can expect a visit from Mr Blankfein?

Even more worrying is Principle 5: “We stress creativity and imagination in everything we do.” One sincerely hopes that people in the compliance department don’t take this edict too seriously.

The remaining principles are predominantly boasts. “We have an uncompromising determination to achieve excellence in everything we undertake,” Principle 4 says, a claim that is belied by the document itself.

The principles aren’t even internally consistent. Quite apart from the central conflict between making money and serving clients, Goldman blithely ignores the clash between its boast about how quickly it promotes good people and Principle 8: “We stress teamwork in everything we do.”

Having pored over these two documents I’m left wondering what is the point of drawing up a list of principles. Stockmann answers this clearly: it is to provide a framework within which decisions can be made.

The purpose of Goldman’s document is rather different. Its principles would be no help in decision making: they are a mixture of untruths, platitudes and boasts which make the right noises but leave little impression. But then maybe that was the point of the exercise. To bore detractors into submission, leaving the bank free to conduct its business according to the time-honoured principles it has always followed.

December 26, 2010

Better to waste time at the office

Even though it’s a weekday and during working hours, I’m in bed. The reason for such slovenliness is that I’m not feeling my best. Too unwell to feel like getting up, yet not so unwell that I can’t move my fingers over a keyboard.

From this position I have been peering at the world of work through my laptop screen and found two things of note.

The first is a video clip from TED (the groovy organisation that devotes itself to “Ideas Worth Spreading”). It shows Jason Fried, a young web entrepreneur in jeans and black T-shirt telling an audience that the office is the worst place in the whole world for doing any work.

The second is the most forwarded document on the internet not to have come from Wikileaks – the new UBS dress code. In 40 gloriously illustrated pages – featuring pearls and stitching details and shiny black shoes – it tells its Swiss bankers precisely how to dress, down to the most intimate detail: women must wear flesh coloured underwear and not get any foundation on their collars and men must wear ties to match the bone structure in their faces.

Both exhibits are quite something individually. But together they represent the full spectrum of contemporary office life – from extreme managerial uptightness, where command and control extends to lipstick, to extreme hang-looseness, where all attempts by managers to impose order merely hamper the inner creativity of the workforce.

Viewed from the perspective of my bed, Mr Fried’s anti-office tirade might seem the more germane. He says the problem with offices are the endless interruptions, which mainly come in the form of meetings and managers. These interruptions are a disaster because work, he says, is like sleep. If you get interrupted you can’t go back to where you were.

You might think he’s right. My progress here and now supports the thesis: I’ve started typing this article with a dogged focus that is harder to replicate at work.

He also has logic on his side. The office has been quite pointless for many years now. It used to make sense in the age of paper and filing cabinets and can-you-take-dictation-Ms Green? But now there is no point to it at all. It is jolly expensive and inefficient and a ludicrous waste of effort, especially when you think of all that commuting.

But in practice Mr Fried is utterly wrong – about offices, about the nature of interruptions and about what to wear when giving a speech.

Companies are groups of people and in order to thrive they need to spend an inordinately large amount of time holed up together. Which means by far the most sensible thing is to herd everyone into offices.

Mr Fried argues that the office is a hostile environment in which to work because the interruptions are imposed by others, whereas at home any interruptions tend to be by choice and are therefore benign.

This proves that he is made of sterner stuff than I. All my worst time-wasting is self-inflicted. My latest addiction is Boggle on the iPad, which I would be playing right now if the thing hadn’t run out of juice and if the charger weren’t downstairs.

What happens when I work at home is that the first hour is productive and then I start going to pieces. It is as if I am governed by an internal time-wasting law that says the amount of time wasted in any day is constant. If others aren’t wasting my time, then I find ways of wasting my own. The difference is that at home time-wasting is very low grade – Boggle benefits no one – while at work it is more sociable and sometimes a good idea materialises as a by-product.

What is even more demoralising about working in bed than playing Boggle is the bad clothing. Clad in my sloppy flannel pyjamas and fleece dressing gown, I’m looking again at the UBS booklet and thinking how crisp those lovely shirts look and marvelling at the wisdom of the advice. No short-sleeved shirts; no cartoons on socks. Skirts must not be too short or too tight. Scarves must be tied just so.

The Wall Street Journal blog says the brochure smacks of Big Brother. Actually, it smacks of big sister and a kindly, helpful one at that. What I would like most to do now is to rise from the uninterrupted squalor of my bed, get up and skip off to the office perfectly groomed in a uniform that gets me in the right frame of mind for working, in an environment where interruptions are imposed by others, leaving it up to me to engage in a little light work in the spaces between.

Better to save face than look in the mirror

At a party last week I met a man who told me he had just lost his job. I commiserated, but he said it was OK, he was well out of it. He explained that his boss was a fool who could not cope with having an underling who was far brighter and more charismatic than him. The man looked perfectly cheerful and reassured me that his pay-off had been large, and the move was his employer’s loss.

I extricated myself and went to talk to a journalist friend who had also recently lost his job. I asked how the job search was going and he said he’d had masses of interviews but no offers. He told me he was getting tired of having to tell everyone that he was brilliant and dead keen, when in fact he was a fairly ordinary journalist who was ordinarily lazy.

This time I commiserated more enthusiastically. By the law of averages, most of us are, on average, deeply average. But in order to get any job at all, we have to pretend otherwise; it’s an exhausting sham.

On the way home I thought about these two men and their different approaches to being fired. Which is better, I wondered: to tell yourself soothing stories that may not chime with the facts or to stare at the truth in all its harshness?

For guidance I turned to the Harvard Business Review website section called Best Practices which offers “straightforward actionable advice”. A blog post called Help! I’m an Underperfomer states that the worst thing we can do is what the first man I spoke to did: blame other people to try to save face. Instead we must acknowledge our failures and recognise what has gone wrong. We must never be defensive. We must ask ourselves – and others – if we have the right skills and “capabilities”.

The response to this from readers on the site is ecstatic. “Fantastic article! Great read! Thank you! Great advice!” they gush.

However, there is only one problem with all this great advice: it’s wrong. It is based on a commonly held, yet fantastical view of human nature: that we are willing or able to change, and that we are rational about ourselves. Both points are false, especially the second.

The clue to the wrongness is in the title of the blog. The dispassionate euphemism “underperformer” is one that I have never heard anyone use to describe themselves. When it comes to our own poor work, we are constitutionally incapable of occupying a neutral middle ground. We either refuse to acknowledge it at all, or we wallow in it, preferring words like: useless, failure, screw-up, hash, pig’s ear and crap.

And this is when things go really awry. Thinking you are crap always makes you much more so. It isn’t the first step to improving. It’s the first step to being unable to get off the sofa all day. It is, therefore, infinitely better to tell yourself a pack of self-serving half-truths. Face-saving stories – or “narratives” as we now must call them – are absolutely vital to survival.

A demonstration of the superiority of self-serving narratives comes from two writers I know. A couple of years ago, they each published their first book and each received a couple of stinging reviews. Writer A’s book was judged to be overly long, saggy and generally unconvincing. She read this and concluded that her book was, indeed, too long, saggy and unconvincing and felt pretty crushed as a result.

Writer B’s book was judged even more harshly. But rather than show any sign of upset, he declared that the reviewer was jealous because his own book had sold badly.

Which author do you think lived happily ever after? Writer B is thriving, blithely considering his book to have been a thwacking great success and has already finished his second. Writer A is badly stuck on her next book, fearing with every word that it’s going to be even saggier than the previous one.

Applying this lesson to the men at the party, I expect that the first man, who blamed his failure on the jealousy of others, will find another job very soon. I fear my honest journalist friend may have to wait rather longer.

The only consolation is those who insist on the painful truth are nicer people than ones who hold up a flattering mirror to themselves. This may be true, but they aren’t necessarily nicer to have around. When a friend tells you that they are merely average or their book sags, you have little choice but to hold out the distorting mirror yourself and insist that actually they are outstanding and their book skips along like nobody’s business.

November 01, 2010

Listening to customers can be bad business

Last week, for the first time ever, the mob on Twitter and Facebook forced the management of a big company into defeat. This victory of democracy over autocracy was scored over something people feel strongly about: whether three letters belong inside or outside a box.

For the past 20 years, the letters G-A-P have resided in a dark blue square, but two weeks ago the management of the clothing company announced that the letters had escaped and that a smaller blue square would henceforth sit above the P. All hell then broke loose. Thousands of people protested online and, a week later, Gap backed down. The big box was going to stay.

The new Gap logo was not obviously an improvement on the old one. And the sight of management listening to customers and accepting humiliation in order to satisfy them seemed like a good thing.

Yet what happened was not really good at all. It isn’t progress when a company panics and surrenders when faced by an armchair army of protesters. It is feeble.

Compare Gap’s experience to that of PwC, which changed its logo two weeks earlier. The new PwC look is an even uglier version of the new Gap effort, with the letters in italicised lower case, and not one, but a whole jumble, of little boxes scattered over the C. This logo was launched old-style, with corporate fanfare and a statement of customary idiocy from senior management, followed by customary sniping from journalists and from a couple of tweeters (people don’t care as much about accountants as about jeans) and that was that.

“We think our new brand expression visually distinguishes PwC in the same way that the quality and expertise of our people differentiates the experience of working with PwC,” said the firm’s chairman. Which is, of course, absolute, total tosh. Three little letters and some squares cannot say anything about quality or expertise at all.

But then logos are a fluffy subject; I have never heard anyone say anything that wasn’t daft about the thinking behind any change. This is because there never is any thinking, save the idea that it’s time to do something different.

PwC’s management evidently judged that time had come, and knows that any fuss will quickly die down. One day people may even become fond of the nasty new look – to the extent to which it is possible to be fond of the logo of an accountancy firm, that is.

Now back to Gap.

Once Marka Hansen, the company’s president for North America, got wind of the scale of the protest, she wrote a piece on The Huffington Post defending the “contemporary and current” new logo. Her post is a marvel for students of corporate language, with its “living and breathing”, its “alignings”, and its “journeys”. But mainly it is remarkable for its disingenuousness. Ms Hansen was surely feeling shock and awe at how badly her new logo had gone down, but claimed to be delighted that everyone felt so “passionate” about it.

The chummy message that she simultaneously posted on the company’s Facebook page was even more frightening for its attempt to get down with the kidz and talk the right chirpy language through gritted teeth: “Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

But even this didn’t work. The mob continued to show its passion by saying it hated the new design and, last Monday, she gave up.

This time the tone was more like when Princess Diana had died. Ms Hansen spoke of the “outpouring of passion from customers” on the company’s old logo and solemnly announced that the letters would stay in the box after all.

She should not have capitulated. By letting tweeters see the whites of her eyes, she has done other companies a disservice. Now that the mob has got its way on this, it is going to be harder for other companies to insist on their management’s right to manage.

Listening to customers is one thing, when they are voting with their wallets. But company logos should not be designed democratically on Twitter. If managers allow themselves to be frightened of the tweeting mob, they will become emasculated, change will be even harder than it ever was, and the status quo will always prevail.

The thief, his victim and the company laptop

Not long ago a story was posted on the Bank of America Merrill Lynch staff website with the headline, “The associate, the burglar and the secured laptop”. It told of an employee who had returned from a family outing to find that her house had been broken into, and all three family laptops pinched.

Luckily, however, the thieves did not get their hands on her company laptop, as she had taken the precaution of attaching it with a security cable to the leg of a heavy piece of furniture.

The woman – I shall call her Ruth – was quoted as saying: “It was bad enough being robbed, but at least I had one less thing to worry about and that was dealing with a lost company laptop”.

The story goes on admiringly: “[Ruth’s] experience is a timely reminder to associates who work from home or leave laptops in the house unattended to lock them with a bank-supplied cable at all times.”

For my money, Ruth’s experience is a timely reminder of nothing of the sort. Instead, it reminds me of three other things: the sinister side of corporate life, the futility of all office security measures and the fact that there are very few corporate secrets worth making such a song and dance about anyway.

First, though, the canonising of Ruth on the strength of her diligence with a metal cord leaves one feeling a bit uncomfortable. It makes me think of those comrades in the Soviet Union who were made heroes for small acts showing how they put communism before their families.

Why, one wonders, did Ruth feel the need to attach the work computer to the leg of a grand piano but not the family computers – which actually belonged to her and presumably had photos and music and homework on them that would be most annoying to lose?

The story also tells us what a muddle companies get into when they start thinking about security.

A cable is not going to stop someone who wants the information on a laptop getting it anyway. The thieves who broke into Ruth’s house could have copied everything on to a disk before they scarpered. Or they could have found the information on the cloud.

The fuss over security suggests that there is a great prize for theft of company data. But is there really?

If someone were to break into my house now and seize my company laptop I would be amazed if they were to find anything terribly interesting. If they could get through the various passwords (that are now so complicated with their mixture of numbers, upper and lower case and punctuation that I can hardly remember them myself), they would have a sneak preview of a couple of half-baked columns I am working on. They might find a couple of gossipy messages. But there would be absolutely nothing that would give a rival a competitive advantage.

I bet the stuff on Ruth’s computer is fantastically boring too. There are only two things that might be worth stealing. The first is customer account details – but one assumes that sort of stuff is encrypted anyway. The second would be if it showed that Ruth or anyone else in the bank was up to anything dodgy. But in that case the answer would not be to be to lock up laptops, but to stop doing dodgy things.

Businesses that are doing things right have little to fear from their secrets getting out. There is no magic ingredient to success that can be found on a nicked laptop. Success is a complicated formula and cannot be easily stolen.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1m laptops were stolen in the US last year. Presumably, a lot of them were company laptops. And how much bad stuff happened as a result?

The only problem with losing stuff is not that harm is done, it is that people fear that harm will be done and the loss does not look pretty in the papers. When a UK government department carelessly threw away a CD containing lots of names all hell broke lose, even though the only thing that was really lost was face.

You may be wondering how I came to hear the story of Ruth, the burglar and the secured laptop. I didn’t steal anyone’s computer. I didn’t hack into anything. Instead, an employee, amused at the bank’s Nineteen Eighty-Four management style, set up a fake e-mail address and sent the page to me. No security cable would have prevented that.

The way to protect your secrets is to conduct your business in a perfectly reasonable way so that they can be of no conceivable interest to anyone.

September 27, 2010

Time to spit out more praise for Apple

Last week, at the very moment I was writing a column praising Apple for its plain way with words, Steve Jobs was entering into an e-mail exchange with a young woman that took plainness to a whole new level.

Chelsea Isaacs, a student from Long Island University, had got in touch with the Apple press office to get some information about the iPad for a paper she was writing. Six times she tried, but no response. So she e-mailed the chief executive to complain.

“Mr Jobs, I humbly ask why Apple is so wonderfully attentive to the needs of students, whether it be with the latest, greatest invention or the company’s helpful customer service line, and yet, ironically, the media relations department fails to answer any of my questions which are, as I have repeatedly told them, essential to my academic performance.”

Mr Jobs replied: “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.”

Chelsea composed another long message in which she argued that Apple should have answered out of common courtesy.

This time he responded: “Nope. We have over 300 million users and we can’t respond to their requests unless they involve a problem of some kind. Sorry.”

So she pointed out she was a customer and did have a problem.

He replied: “Please leave us alone.”

It is just possible that Mr Jobs himself didn’t write these e-mails. Indeed, Apple’s media relations department has no more replied to queries on that score than they have to Chelsea’s.

Yet whether he did or not, the world is judging him badly. “Profoundly unhelpful,” says the Guardian. Various Apple-hating readers have gloatingly forwarded the exchange to me, inviting me to swallow my words of praise.

But I’m not going to swallow them. I’m going to spit out some more. Mr Jobs may be a slightly unpleasant piece of work, scary and arrogant. But if these messages are his, I congratulate him on his clarity, his tetchiness and on being entirely in the right.

Chelsea is to be congratulated, too. By goading the head of Apple, she has unwittingly stumbled on a much better topic for a journalistic paper than some nonsense about the iPad.

The first lesson is about brevity. Her initial message was 473 words. His was 12. His words were short and sharp and easy to understand. Hers less so. Even in the one unwieldy sentence quoted above, she makes three elementary mistakes. She uses the word “humble” when she isn’t. She refers to irony when there is none. And sarcasm is always a mistake in an e-mail, especially if you are trying to get your own way.

The next lesson is that it is OK for a CEO to be rude to a customer. The customer need not always be king, especially when he or she is behaving like a spoilt, tiresome brat. So long as the rudeness doesn’t involve a loss of dignity and it isn’t being used, Michael O’Leary-style, as a tiresome stunt to get attention for Ryanair, then it is fine.

Moreover, in this particular case, Mr Jobs’ grumpiness was in the public interest. He was making a vital, though unfashionable, point about priorities. If I were an Apple shareholder I’d be reassured to know that the company’s top priority did not include helping out Chelsea.

The point needs to be made harshly, because modern students simply don’t get it. I often get e-mails from them saying: “I’m doing an essay on marketing. Can you please send me everything you’ve written on this subject?” Next time I’m going to tell them straight: “No, I can’t. It’s not my job.”

When Mr Jobs was a student, if he needed help I daresay he did what we all did back then: ask a teacher, or work it out yourself. But Chelsea’s generation has been duped by the self-esteem movement into believing its development is a matter of general concern, and then duped some more by the internet, which has taught it that the world is democratic and it can have everything right now.

Alas, these beliefs sit so deep, that Mr Jobs’ forceful messages have not struck anywhere near home: Chelsea was last week still indignantly waiting for the busy head of one of the world’s most remarkable companies to say sorry.

“I have nothing against him,” she said magnanimously. “I hope he gives me a call.”

I trust she will have to wait an eternity for that call, and in the meantime will grow up and get a job and discover that working life is not a democracy and there is a hierarchy, and being just a little humble isn’t a bad way to start.

September 20, 2010

Words to describe the glory of Apple

Like most Brits, I find success in others pretty hard to cope with. When that success is combined with good looks, I can’t tolerate it at all.

Apple’s continued glory eats away at me like a maggot at my core. I long for it to pick up some bruises. When the iPad came out, I prayed that it would be awful. My prayers were not heard: like all Apple products, it is sleek and gorgeous, and in due course I shall go to one of its wondrous temples of consumption and grumpily buy one.

Now I find that Apple has succeeded in an area even more revolutionary than designing beautiful products that are easy to use. This time, though, I feel no discomfort. Apple has discovered something that other companies have long forgotten, if they ever knew: language can also be beautiful and easy to use. Words can be fun to read. They can look elegant. They can make you laugh.

Earlier this month it published a set of guidelines for apps sold at its App Store. According to the laws that govern this sort of thing, this document should have been doubly unreadable. It was a list of legal requirements and was aimed at techies. Instead, it was funny and clear, and I found myself reading it effortlessly, even though I barely know what an “app” is.

“We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps. If your app doesn’t do something useful or provide some form of lasting entertainment, it may not be accepted.”

The tone is direct, comic and elegantly threatening.

“We will reject apps for any content or behaviour that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, I’ll know it when I see it. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.”

Now compare this to the standard stuff on the Microsoft website. The brand new browser, it says, “delivers a richer, faster, and more business-ready Web experience. Architected to run HTML 5, the beta enables developers to utilise standardised mark-up language across multiple browsers”. Well I never. Reading this, I’m bored and restless, irritated and alienated.

Given the towering superiority of the first linguistic style over the second, will it catch on? Will other companies copy Apple’s language just as they have copied its design?

You might think so. You might think there was a clear commercial advantage to be had in writing clearly and stylishly. But you would be wrong. There is no sign that Microsoft has been suffering from its stolid, dodgy way with words. Indeed it is one of the great mysteries of capitalism that there is no invisible hand that joins good language and good profits. If anything, the hand pushes the two apart.

Even in industries that make their money by selling messages there is no appetite for clarity. Just last week a reader sent me the following sentence from the blog of Bob Jeffrey, the head of JWT, in which he describes what his vast and successful advertising agency does: “Global consumers are rapidly re-evaluating and readjusting their value paradigms and purchasing decisions. Our job is to keep our ear to the ground with these consumers, providing relevant real-time insight to our clients that inspires cutting-edge, cost-efficient solutions.”

The Apple version of this would be something like: “Consumers can change so we try to keep up.” This version reads better, but it is not hard to see why Mr Jeffrey didn’t put it that way. “A relevant real-time insight” sounds like something that a befuddled client might pay more money for.

An even better example of the link between high profits and low language was on the appointments pages in the Financial Times 10 days ago. It was an advertisement from “one of the largest and most trusted banking and financial services organisations in the world” which was hoping to hire a “customer journey re-engineering manager”.

This title contains three layers of obfuscation: the ludicrous yet ubiquitous idea that a banking customer is on a journey; the idea that this journey needs re-engineering; the notion that this needs managing. There is only one conclusion to be drawn: surplus profits generate bonuses and bullshit in equal measure.

The only customers who are really on a journey are those of the transport sector. And as I looked at a collection of them chugging along into Moorgate station last week I thought of another reason why Apple’s brave effort to rehabilitate language won’t catch on. Words are finished. Customers on journeys don’t read. They watch videos on their iPads, iPhones and iPods.

September 13, 2010

Why CEOs cry all the way to the bank

Bob Diamond is full of energy and enthusiasm. He likes taking risks. He is determined: he knows what he wants and goes for it. He is fearless, cheerfully taking on a job he has little experience of. He speaks (relatively) simply. He has been known to throw tantrums. He is greedy and always wants more.

I’ve never met him, but on the strength of what I’ve been reading about him I’m absolutely confident that he’s going to make an excellent new chief at Barclays. This is because he accords perfectly with a brand new theory of leadership that is surprising, radical, yet utterly compelling. This theory says that the best CEOs are just like toddlers.

Until last week, I had always thought that it was the worst CEOs that had so much in common with two-year-olds. Both groups tend to swagger round with a wide-legged gait. Both say “mine” a lot and are exceedingly bad at sharing. Both have short attention spans. Both lack common sense and have issues with listening. CEOs and toddlers are also hazy about the existence of other human beings, tending to view them as objects. They both inspire fear in the hearts of their handlers. And anyone who has observed how toddlers behave on aircraft will realise why it is a good idea for CEOs to travel in private jets.

But then I was sent a message putting me right. Toddlers, it argued, are not negative role models but have the perfect range of skills to run public companies.

This discovery was made by Nicholas Brann, a former banker whose third child was just about to become a toddler. He had been dreading this stage, so to get himself into a better frame of mind he sat down and made a list of the good things about young children. When he’d finished, he noticed something strange. Each of the positive traits that he remembered from his toddlers were the same traits in the best CEOs he had worked for over the years. His list, which includes many of the characteristics that Mr Diamond seems to have in spades, goes like this:

● Toddlers are full of energy and enthusiasm. You can’t beat a toddler who is really into something and going for it 100 per cent.

● Toddlers are natural risk-takers. They throw themselves into climbing down the banisters in the boldest, bravest fashion.

● Toddlers are persistent. When told not to smear jam on a DVD, they will wait a couple of minutes and then do it again.

● Toddlers are inquisitive. They will not be fobbed off with a stock reply but go on asking “why? why? why?”

● Toddlers are creative. Their felt-tip drawings on walls and sofas betray the liveliest imagination.

● Toddlers have great interpersonal skills. They are good at thawing the hardest heart with hugs and sloppy kisses.

It is a splendid start but I feel there are more traits that the finest CEOs share with two-year-olds. They are assertive and jolly good at saying no. They are not hamstrung by inhibitions. They will march straight up to someone and say: “Who are you?” They are good at making decisions. They don’t need Malcolm Gladwell to tell them to trust their instincts.

I realise that this is just scratching the surface – there is material here for many leadership books. In fact, it is a mystery that none have yet been written when you think of how many books there are on the leadership lessons from tribal warfare, orchestras, boxing, mountaineering, even on beekeeping.

I suspect the reason management thinkers have avoided the parallels with toddlers is it upsets their faith in the idea that leadership is an endless “journey” of improvement or “lifelong learning”. The toddler theory says the reverse. Good leaders have the right skills already, the trick is to avoid dulling their edges with too many civilised niceties picked up along the way.

There is one final way in which the toddler is a great role model for the CEO: language. Toddlers say what they mean and say it simply. They never feel tempted to dwell on paradigm shifts or value stacks or synergies.

In this area, too, Mr Diamond shows promise. When the British government said he couldn’t buy Lehman’s assets, he expressed himself with great clarity in an e-mail: “Couldn’t have gone more poorly, very frustrating. Little England.”

In fact, there is only one thing that is wrong with Mr Diamond. It’s not, as was widely said last week, that he is the unacceptable face of banking. It’s that, at 59, he is about 56 years past his peak.

August 25, 2010

Raise a glass to lust and liquor at work

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: August 15 2010 18:57 | Last updated: August 15 2010 18:57

Last night, I did what I always do when I’m feeling jaded. I got out my boxed set of Mad Men and immersed myself in the hedonistic, glamorous world of Madison Avenue in the 1960s, when all women were a 38 DDD cup, all men drank scotch from lunchtime until bedtime, everyone chain-smoked and fornicated whenever they got the chance.

The show is delightful because of its contrast to the dreariness of modern, strait-laced office life. In the past 10 days, two things have happened that make me think the laces are now pulled too tight; so tight, in fact, that they are cutting off the oxygen to people’s heads.

The first was the sex scandal that resulted in the resignation of Mark Hurd as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. As sex scandals go, this one was scandalously unsexy. Indeed, according to news reports, there was no sex in it at all. There was no harassment, no hanky or panky, yet the “close personal relationship” between Mr Hurd and a female consultant nevertheless breached the company’s rules and action therefore needed to be taken.

“Zero tolerance” read the headline in the Financial Times a week ago. But zero tolerance of what? I have read the news stories and press releases and the only damning thing I could find was that Mr Hurd and the woman had some dinners together that were put on expenses. This was judged grave enough to cause Mr Hurd to beat himself with the birch rod, saying: “I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP.”

But what standards were these? And how didn’t he live up to them?

The HR board was congratulated for acting decisively in ousting the formerly heroic CEO. It may have been decisive but the decision was a feeble one. It decided that it would be better to lose a good CEO than to admit that he was a slightly flawed human being. The price was heavy: shareholders lost $10bn overnight in the value of their shares, while the disgraced Mr Hurd left the company with a fat pay-out for his pains.

The most puzzling detail about it all is that the meals appear to have cost $20,000. The only explanation I can think of for such a big bill is that perhaps Mr Hurd and the woman comforted themselves for being unable to commit adultery by committing gluttony instead.

While the modern, Hewlett-Packard-style sex scandal is long on scandal and short on sex, in Mad Men things are the other way round: heavy on sex, light on scandal. This seems healthier all round, particularly as far as shareholders are concerned.

At Sterling Cooper, the fictional ad agency, the fornication is messy and people get hurt and babies get conceived out of wedlock. There is a human cost but the agency itself escapes unscathed and the business of writing and selling ads goes on unaffected. There is a delightful simplicity and innocence to all this. Employees work, behave badly and then work some more.

They also do something else at Sterling Cooper that no one does 40 years on in America: drink.

The second thing that happened last week shows just how extreme the anti-booze fanaticism has become. At the Academy of Management in Montreal, a paper was presented proving that simply holding a glass of wine can damage your career. In the most dismal experiment ever carried out, 610 managers were asked to watch candidates being interviewed over dinner. The interviewer ordered wine; some candidates followed suit while others chose soda. Even though the candidates did not raise the glass to their lips, those with wine in front of them were judged less intelligent than those staring at a glass of Fanta.

Watching Don Draper in Mad Men raise something far stronger than wine to his lips doesn’t make me doubt his intelligence; it makes me long for those heavy drinking days. This nostalgia is only slightly dented by my memory of what life was actually like in the 1980s on Fleet Street when journalists sloped off to the pub every lunch time. Unless my memory is playing tricks, the men then did not look like Don Draper. They had giant pot bellies, and they sometimes slurred their words in the afternoons.

In the world of Mad Men, judgment was warped by lust and alcohol. But in the puritanical, modern business world, judgment is warped by something more pernicious: fear of lust and fear of alcohol. Both worlds were bad, but the first surely had the edge on the second: at least it was intermittently enjoyable.

July 21, 2010

A couple of years ago there was an article in Harvard Business Review showing that loveable people are valuable as they glue teams together. It found that, overwhelmingly, we all prefer the loveable fool over the incompetent jerk.

But there is another reason for being kind to the loveable fool. It makes everyone else feel better. When I see someone who is both incompetent and beastly holding on to a good job it makes me cross with my employer for bad management. But when I see someone who is hopeless but sweet being put into a job where they do little harm, it makes me conclude that my employer is benign, and that the world isn’t such a bad place after all.

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Nice dud is key to office harmony

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: July 18 2010 18:51 | Last updated: July 18 2010 18:51

Last Tuesday, during the final assembly of the year at my daughter’s school, pupils said goodbye to a teacher who was being elbowed out. Miss T was famous for her feebleness at imparting knowledge; the new broom of a head had decided it would make more sense to give the job to someone who could teach instead.

Yet last Tuesday morning, as the goodbyes were being made, the girls climbed up on to their chairs and clapped and whooped. They loved Miss T. She was a dear, kind woman who had been at the school long before they were even born. Of all the many things that they held against their reforming head teacher, the sacking of Miss T was the most unforgivable.

The previous weekend, the head of the schools watchdog, Ofsted, was quoted in the papers arguing that a bad teacher was needed in every primary school. Predictably, all hell broke loose. But Zenna Atkins was quite right. We do need the odd bad teacher. More than that: we need the odd bad manager and bad worker too. Her point was that a dud teacher teaches children to respect the authority of the office, even when the incumbent doesn’t merit any. This lesson, she rightly pointed out, comes in handy later in life. Dealing with idiots in authority is a skill needed in every workplace and is well learnt early.

She could have deployed other arguments, too. Bad teaching makes us respect good teaching more as, without bad, good doesn’t really mean anything. Even more important, dud teachers encourage students to be resourceful. It was lucky that I had some bad teaching at primary school, as it prepared me for Oxford where bad teaching was taken to a whole new level. Indeed, many of the dons who “taught” me didn’t even pretend to go through the motions, so I had no choice but to teach myself instead.

In offices, the arguments for the token dud are even stronger. To work somewhere where everyone was excellent would be sheer hell. Dangerous, too: look at what happened in the investment banks. All those clever, competitive people in a hothouse together without a few duds to discourage them from inventing derivatives so complicated that no one could understand them.

We also need bad workers as a measuring stick. Management wisdom dictates that everyone needs to benchmark themselves against best practice. In reality, benchmarking yourself against worst practice is a much better idea: it gets you to the same place in the end, but lifts morale in the process. Indeed, nothing cheers me up more on a day when I am having difficulty writing than reading the raw copy of a truly hopeless journalist. Then I feel as if I’m Marcel Proust by comparison, and the words flow.

The more pressing argument, though, is not whether organisations need a few bad managers or schools need a few bad teachers. There is a massive oversupply of duds in all walks of life; the problem is what to do about it.

There are various options. The first is to try, through training and a mixture of stick and carrot, to convert duds into non-duds. This is admirable, but hard work and the chances of success are slim. The defining characteristic of a true dud is that he or she resists improvement staunchly.

The second option is to engage in ethnic cleansing of “C” players and fire the bottom 10 per cent every year. This system was made famous by Jack Welch but is so distasteful that even GE does not adhere to it as religiously as it used to.

The third option is to muddle through, shedding a few duds and tolerating the rest. This is what most companies end up doing, but the trouble is that they don’t do it terribly well. They haven’t discovered the principle that my daughter and her friends learnt last week: get rid of the horrid duds if you must, but keep the nice ones.

A couple of years ago there was an article in Harvard Business Review showing that loveable people are valuable as they glue teams together. It found that, overwhelmingly, we all prefer the loveable fool over the incompetent jerk.

But there is another reason for being kind to the loveable fool. It makes everyone else feel better. When I see someone who is both incompetent and beastly holding on to a good job it makes me cross with my employer for bad management. But when I see someone who is hopeless but sweet being put into a job where they do little harm, it makes me conclude that my employer is benign, and that the world isn’t such a bad place after all.

July 12, 2010

It’s time to sack job appraisals

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: July 11 2010 20:27 | Last updated: July 11 2010 20:27

Last week an e-mail went round the office touting for suggestions on ways to improve our performance appraisal system. My suggestion is dead easy and dirt cheap: get rid of the whole thing and replace it with nothing at all.

Normally, if I have any bright ideas about how this newspaper could be managed better, I propose them in private. It is not seemly to wash the Financial Times’ dirty linen in public. Yet when it comes to appraisals, the linen of every other company is covered with much the same filthy stains as ours, and so there seems no shame in suggesting a mass outing to the launderette.

Over the past 30 years, I have been appraised three dozen times – as banker, journalist and non-executive director. I’ve lived through the craze for long, complicated forms. I’ve also survived the informal fashion in which appraisals are called “career chats” and where a bogus air of equality prevails. I’ve done appraisals across a table, on a sofa, even over a meal. I’ve had them à deux and à trois – with a facilitator in tow.

But never have I learnt anything about myself as a result. I have never set any target that I subsequently hit. Instead I always feel as if I am playing a particularly dismal game of charades, with three disadvantages over the traditional parlour game. There is no dressing-up box; there is no correct answer to guess and it isn’t remotely fun. The norm is a harrowing hour’s conversation during which you are forced to swallow an indigestible mix of praise and criticism referring to long-ago events, which leaves you demotivated and confused on the most basic question: am I doing a good job? The resulting form is then put on file, making you feel vaguely paranoid, even though you know from experience how much attention will be subsequently paid to it: none whatsoever.

At least I’ve only had to suffer one side of the process. I have never – thank goodness – had to appraise anyone else, which must be even more tiresome as you have to perform the same operation with each underling in turn, wearily letting people believe they are doing more or less okay, because it’s too tiring to drop the bombshell that they aren’t doing okay at all.

I have a friend in a large company who spends an entire month each year appraising her team. She says the system has been “improved” so that she no longer sorts people into “exceptional performers”, “good performers” and so on. Instead she works through a list of mysterious attributes – such as “leverages mastery” and “innovates holistically” – choosing three strengths and one development need (or weakness, as it was formerly known) for each.

She admits that this system – which applies to almost 100,000 people worldwide – is utterly idiotic. But when I suggest it be scrapped she looks shocked. “Out of the question,” she says. “That would be interpreted as us saying we don’t care about developing people.”

Not by everyone, it seems. Last week Samuel Culbert, a business school professor in California, went on US radio to say that all appraisal systems were total baloney. He thinks even less of them than I do. They were a throwback to the bad old days of management by objective, he said, and only persisted because they allow evil managers to hold employees down and because HR managers are like the KGB when it comes to hoarding information.

His alternative, which he describes in his new book Get Rid of the Performance Review, is that bosses and underlings should have regular, equal conversations during which the boss says things like: “What do you need from me to deliver what we are both on the firing line to produce?”

This is a fantastic idea. The only trouble is that it bears no relation to the world as I know it; managers don’t talk or think like that.

The most sinister thing about the current system is that it allows managers to delude themselves into thinking that they are managing their people.

With this delusion stripped away, some managers might take matters into their own hands. They might even start saying “that’s good” and “that’s not so good” at the only helpful time to say such things: when they have just happened. This sort of thing is called managing, and the beauty of it is that it makes formal appraisals quite unnecessary.

Even for those whose managers did nothing to fill the gap, there would still be a net gain from scrapping appraisals. Time and energy would be saved and the only two things lost would be cynicism and paranoia.